Paint Splotches

 We need to transfer these patterns over to the new carriage house in Virginia :)

Carriage House Floor Patterns

 24 Feb 21:

We are making tracings of the Carriage House floor art and catboat half breadths, to transfer over to the new Carriage House in Virginia.

Log of the Carriage House.

Steam Boats and Steam Trains

06 Feb 26:

The Surry Lumber Company founded the Surry, Sussex and Southhampton Railway in the late 1800s and the trains made their way to the wharf in Scotland, VA to offload lumber and many different types of wood products. 

2 Million Views!

 05 Mar 26:

Our blog quietly slipped past two million views last month! It's been getting some views lately, we never know why some days peak and others do not. 

We've had a lot of fun sharing information about small boats and plan to keep messing about :)

Thanks for viewing!

Kent and Audrey

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Skipper's Guide to Small Boat Knots

 02 Mar 26: 

A little book of the 4 basic knots to get started messing about in small boats. Color photos of real knots in use on real boats, the bowline, figure 8, half hitch and square knot. Also includes chapters on the sailor's spar hitch and marlin hitch. Bonus chapters cover nautical terms, how to tie a cleat hitch, wrap a flemish coil, belay a line and whip the end of a line, all the boatcraft skills needed to keep a small ship looking ship shape. The small boats featured in this guide are some of the most popular sailboats ever made, the Sunfish, the O'Day Daysailer and the Drascombe Lugger, so there is a good chance you'll be tying lines on one of these boats.

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Knot-Skippers-Guide-Small/dp/1724677632

Still Life

01 Mar 26:

Last we checked George still had Kirby calendars, we scored one with our last order. 2026 is rolling by fast, and we had 60F in the Boat Works today. First day of meteorological Spring, heading towars the vernal equinox.

 

Mississippi River Skiff Frames

26 Feb 16:

Fast Forward, we are framed up to station 6, sealing up cracks, plugging nail holes and returning plank pieces to the bottom.

We need to up our boathouse game...

Here was the plan back in 2021...There will be a Carriage House v2.0 built when we get the Hampton Roads area. Don't be surprised if it looks similar to the Gosport Naval Shipyard boat houses of the 1840s, with a canal cut to a drydock area behind the Casa :)

Pods

 23 Feb 26: 

Pod 2 made a pretty smooth trip, no damage. The key is to build a good shelf and reinforce all of the frames

Armada Relocation PODS #2

 16 Feb 21:

We loaded PODS #2 with our Penobscot 14 ST. JACQUES, Pelican Icon kayaks SACAGAWEA and CLARK and the parts for the Pascagoula Diamond Bottom Catboat MARGARET ROSE. For this load we built another platform above the boats to hold more boat shop bits.

Boat Furniture

 BARBASHELA Table

Skipper was sad back in 2016 when we took BARBASHELA back to the little skiff back to her Museum home in Biloxi, Mississippi. 

So back in 2016 I made her a porch table using measurements from BARBASHELA's bow. It was a good exercise to see if the lines we had taken off of BARBASHELA were accurate. The bow seat was cut from cypress left over from the restoration and fastened with silicone bronze fasteners. Coatings are BARBASHELAS's colors, Valspar Ultra 4000 alkyd enamel Swiss Coffee, Whipped Apricot and Mark Twain House Brown.

Airport Weather = Marine Weather?

 21 Feb 26:

There are many airports across the country that are close to small boat ports, and those airports can provide a source of weather for a specific area, especially wind. With a google search for a Chart Supplement for the area, we can find phone numbers to the Airport Surface Observation System (ASOS) or AWOS.

The ASOS may also report the weather to websites like airnav, and there is the Aviation Weather Center website, but it is fun to call the number and listen to the up to the minute report for wind, temp, cloud cover and barometric pressure.